Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/927569/

The kernel’s hierarchical maintainer model works quite well from the
standpoint of allowing thousands of developers to work together without
(often) stepping on each others’ toes. But that model can also make life
painful for developers who are trying to make changes across numerous
subsystems. Other possible source of pain include changes related to
licensing or those where maintainers don’t understand the purpose of the
work. Nick Alcock has managed to hit all of those hazards together in his
effort to perform what would seem like a common-sense cleanup of the
kernel’s annotations for loadable modules.